Monday Aug 16, 2004

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Speaking Tour, Film Screenings and TV Appearances Check the calendar for information about Greg's upcoming appearances on Long Island on Saturday, June 5, and Friday, June 11. Groups please email us for sponsoring and fundraising opportunities. Order Counting on Democracy, the film that tells you what really happened in the Florida presidential election of 2000. For more information about the film click here. Groups please email us for information on holding screenings. Download the MP3 of Silence of the Media Lambs featuring Greg, part of Say it LOUD: New Songs for Peace, produced by Pacifica Radio and The Polemic Consortium. It's great!

There's so much BS and baloney thrown around about Venezuela that I may be violating some rule of US journalism by providing some facts. Let's begin with this: 77% of Venezuela's farmland is owned by 3% of the population, the 'hacendados.'

I met one of these farmlords in Caracas at an anti-Chavez protest march. Oddest demonstration I've ever seen: frosted blondes in high heels clutching designer bags, screeching, "Chavez - dic-ta-dor!" The plantation owner griped about the "socialismo" of Chavez, then jumped into his Jaguar convertible.

That week, Chavez himself handed me a copy of the "socialist" manifesto that so rattled the man in the Jag. It was a new law passed by Venezuela's Congress which gave land to the landless. The Chavez law transferred only fields from the giant haciendas which had been left unused and abandoned.

This land reform, by the way, was promoted to Venezuela in the 1960s by that Lefty radical, John F. Kennedy. Venezuela's dictator of the time agreed to hand out land, but forgot to give peasants title to their property.

But Chavez won't forget, because the mirror reminds him. What the affable president sees in his reflection, beyond the ribbons of office, is a "negro e indio" -- a "Black and Indian" man, dark as a cola nut, same as the landless and, until now, the hopeless. For the first time in Venezuela's history, the 80% Black-Indian population elected a man with skin darker than the man in the Jaguar.

So why, with a huge majority of the electorate behind him, twice in elections and today with a nearly two-to-one landslide victory in a recall referendum, is Hugo Chavez in hot water with our democracy-promoting White House?

Maybe it's the oil. Lots of it. Chavez sits atop a reserve of crude that rivals Iraq's. And it's not his presidency of Venezuela that dri ... [ Click here for full article ]

Sunday Aug 15, 2004

Here's Venezuela in a snapshot.

The matronly blonde in the stylish leaopard - patterned blouse doesn't like the President of this Latin state. Correction: Maria Christina Tortosa hates, despises, sees red when she speaks of President Hugo Chavez. "A co-moon-ist!" she avers in English.

Her polite interlocutor -- red t-shirt, brown skin, eyes impatiently averted -- is in a good mood. Jorge Lara collected six thousand signatures of local voters seeking to recall members of Congress who oppose his hero Chavez.

And that's what it's all about. Race and class. Whatever else you hear about Venezuela, this is the story in a single frame. Like apartheid-riven South Africa, the whites, 20% of the population, have the nation's wealth under lock and key. The Rich Fifth have command of the oil wealth, the best jobs, the English-language lessons, the imported clothes, the vacations in Miami, the plantations.

That is, until Hugo Chavez came along.

Now the brown people, like community activist Lara -- and President Chavez himself-- have a piece of the action. "Negro e indio," Chavez calls himself. Black and Indian. And the blondes don't like it.

In the photo's background, there's a guy with a gun, a soldier with t ... [ Click here for full article ]